In our class, Design Thinking in Education, we conducted the “Whose Life?” exercise, developed by Steve Bishop, of IDEO. In the exercise, teams get to know a user by examining around 20 photos from a user camera study. (I…
Reform By Design: Using a Touchpoint Matrix to Visualize a System of Research Support Services
May 11, 2012 By
This is a touchpoint matrix I sketched to represent a set of services to support faculty research in a college of education. The content in the matrix was developed by a faculty committee at my school that’s charged with improving research suppor…
Reform By Design: Listening, Leadership, and Change
April 30, 2012 By
What trait will serve you the most as a school leader? There is no shortage of lists extolling the most important knowledge, skills, and abilities that school leaders should hold. Twenty years ago SEDL (http://bit.ly/Kmrogg) suggested that the fol…
Reform By Design: The G School: Design thinking across grade levels in K-12 schools
February 6, 2012 By
This video nicely captures the way in which design thinking can be integrgated into the K-12 curriculum, with secondary students on design teams in service to younger users in the same school district. In this case, the younger “user group” is a 5th …
Reform By Design: Curriculum as a continual process of design
February 1, 2012 By
Michale Apple suggests that curriculum is a design process in Official Knowledge:
“… following a long line of educators from Dewey to Huebner, I conceive of curriculum as a complicated and continual process of environmental design. Thus, do not th…
Reform By Design: Finally, consultants to schools who actually know what they are talking about
January 17, 2012 By
It’s simply not possible.
Or is it?
Let’s say you’re a middle school principal. How can you engage a large group of consultants, each having anywhere between six to eight years of classroom experience, and have them conduct 90 days of observ…
Reform By Design: Ways to stoke (and kill) brainstorming
October 17, 2011 By
The notion of brainstorming ideas has been around for a while. It’s reported that Alex Faickney Osborn popularized the term in his 1953 book Applied Imagination. At that time, Osborn suggested that ideative efficiency (wow, that’s jargony),…
Reform By Design: Useful and interesting design thinking links
May 18, 2011 By
Image Flickr CC Darren Hester
My colleague at the University of Minnesota (and fellow design thinker and UW Badger), Paul Zenke, has shared some great links with me lately and they are too good not to pass on.
Knowmads (Based on UMN’s Joh…
Reform By Design: Portable design thinking kits for the classroom
May 16, 2011 By
See the full gallery on Posterous
Today I kick off my summer teaching duties at Iowa State University and I’ll be incorporating design thinking into my course, “Leading School Reform.” My students are aspiring school principals from Ot…
Reform By Design: Design thinking is not dead, but business culture has eaten it for lunch
May 2, 2011 By
Bruce Nussbaum suggests that design thinking is a failed experiment and that it’s time to move on to something new.
As the former assistant managing editor at Business Week, he knows how to write a lead that gets attention.
What the t…